It is a great game for people who are unfamiliar with PC building. Game is relaxing and gives an intro to PC enthusiast world. It plays on a fantasy of repairing computers and scratches the same itch as all those trucking simulators. It is just relaxing if monotonic gameplay
For further discussions and full review: Calicifer’s Reviews
Problems
To me it is more of a mixed bag. It does few things well, but many areas are in dire need of improvement. It is focused pleasing a casual gamer who does not expect much from a game. Sadly for the game, here I have to judge this experience against all the other possible gaming experiences and game simply falls short.
It is designed to be grindy, but also it simply does not have much content in it. You will get template emails requiring you to do select few variations of a same thing. It is a massive grind and while content is being unlocked constantly, it is drip fed to you in order to keep you on a life support. You better make sure you love base gameplay, because you sure as hell be getting mountains of it.
Runs like a brick
I quit when game had bugged out on me. I had searched forums and found out that other people also have similar bugs. In my run, computer which was brought for upgrades started to overheat. This had happened when I replaced GPU to more powerful one. I reloaded and then replaced CPU to more powerful version. Same thing happened and there was nothing I could do, game simply decides that in some cases computer will overheat and there is nothing you can do. I will attach the footage of this bug. Here is a list of things which I had tried to no avail:
Nothing had solved the issue. Motherboard change might had brought something up, but this was a simple upgrade task which rules out any broken units. This bug causes system to overheat. This can happen in cases where supposedly should not be an issue with a system. What I had tried: 1) Slightly increasing either CPU or GPU power on its own.
- One of the pettiest complaints is that this game is poorly optimised. Game consumes a lot of GPU resources for not much to show for it. It is grossly unoptimised and incompetently made. The best example of this is when you want to install select few parts, game will literally freeze, throw a loading symbol and it will actually load a random part for you. What is this? 1990 era game? Get your ♥♥♥♥ together devs!
Poor graphics/textures - Game aesthetically looks like a vomit. It has that grainy overlay over its textures. A lot of parts are simply missing textures or have placeholder textures. For example, a lot of coolers are simply still untextured in this game, but nobody seems to mind half-baked state of this game.
Poor simulation - As a simulator it is quite a bad one. It simulates problems at a very surface level. The best example which I can bring up is that overheating is done instantly. Realistically it would be a problem in a long run, processor might run hot, it might take a lot of time, computer might throttle, artefacts might appear on screen, etc. In this game it is straight to a bluescreen. There are countless other simplifications, OS installation takes moments, but this can be omitted for a sake of brevity. Cable management also raised some question marks. The biggest issue is that this game takes a problem, makes it an abstract one and simplifies to a point to a simple cause and effect. The whole simulation aspect of this game is child-like. Which is again, great for kids getting into enthusiast world of PC building, bad for actual enthusiasts.
Handholding - In this game the only mistake you can do is to put used parts or use wires of wrong colour. That is it. Game literally won’t allow you to miss something. It will keep PC locked until you find all the problems. This makes whole diagnose and fix tasks trivial and otherwise reduces a task of finding issues with a computer to being parody of itself. Even in brief moments when you fix computer and might forget to run anti-virus program, game won’t allow you to fail. There is no challenge or difficulty in this game, the only way to fail is to pick a wrong colour cables…
Letters - In order to pick any job in this game, you first have to read customer’s letter and accept his job. The problem with this is that letters are lazily generated. You will quickly start noticing templates. Few letters which are written by a human are more interesting. However, humans do not talk like they should in this game. Your customers do not talk like human beings, but rather entities which try to pretend being humans.
Even generic letters are written in such bizarre way:
-“I’m into cable management. Are you into cable management?”;
-“MSI components are meant to be the bomb”;
-“I’m total MSI fanboy”;
It is like your clients are lizard people from Earth’s core. Come to think of, this game sees its clients as technically gifted in some areas like diagnosing issues while being incredibly stupid or lazy in doing anything about it. Additionally, even most poor teenager can afford thousands of dollars building new PC. Even a request for a small upgrade can be done by purchasing best parts on the market. All these clients are simply loaded and they do not care much about price tag. They even let you take their property!
Another issue with your customers is that they always know what is wrong with their pc, they are obsessed over cable management, all they can think is getting new, but not used parts. They are sending PC to get specific benchmark scores. Whole experience is very gamey and unrealistic. Instead of getting a real repair shop experience of users not having a clue what had happened with their computer, these things know exactly what they want and what is wrong with their PC. On top of that they know exactly how much repair will cost. There is no interaction with them about cost of repair, timetables, etc. It is either unreasonable in one or other direction. Incredibly short and tight on budget or incredibly long time window and virtually unlimited budgets. There is nothing in between for these lizard people.
Budget - In this game budget is the biggest missed opportunity. Nearly every client has an immense budget. If a person comes for a modest upgrade for their computer, you simply replace their GTX 1650 Super with RTX 3080 Ti. If customer has RTX 3070 Ti, he will be more than happy to pay for a brand new RTX 3080 upgrade and nobody will mind just giving their old RTX 3070 Ti away in the process. Budget in this game rarely matters and the whole gameplay aspect of trying to fit into limited budget, making compromises and cutting corners simply do not exist.
Imagine a game where you could try to cheat and use used part on a basis that client does not know any better. You would do so, because clients would usually be obsessed over how much repair cost and often being impatient. Imagine how cool it would be that game would organically motivate you to cheat and try to pass used parts as new to unexpecting customer. Sadly, I dream of a better game which does not exist.
Bugs
I quit when game had bugged out on me. I had searched forums and found out that other people also have similar bugs. In my run, computer which was brought for upgrades started to overheat. This had happened when I replaced GPU to more powerful one. I reloaded and then replaced CPU to more powerful version. Same thing happened and there was nothing I could do, game simply decides that in some cases computer will overheat and there is nothing you can do. I will attach the footage of this bug. Here is a list of things which I had tried to no avail:
- Changing thermal paste;
- Attaching more powerful CPU cooler;
- Attaching more fans to PC chassis;
- Replacing PSU with far more powerful one;
- Specifically checking if I did not forgot any wiring;
- Changing just CPU or GPU in a computer;
Nothing had solved the issue. Motherboard change might had brought something up, but this was a simple upgrade task which rules out any broken units. This bug causes system to overheat. This can happen in cases where supposedly should not be an issue with a system. What I had tried: 1) Slightly increasing either CPU or GPU power on its own.